A new type of FET and SRAM device using the same (NDR FETs) is described in detail in a patent application Ser. No. 10/029,077 filed Dec. 21, 2001 assigned to the present assignee, and published on May 9, 2002 as Publication No. 2002/0054502. The NDR FET structure, operation and method of making the same are discussed in detail in patent application Ser. No. 09/603,101 filed Jun. 22, 2000 by King et. al., which is also assigned to the present assignee. Such details are also disclosed in a corresponding PCT application PCT/USO1/19825 which was published as publication No. WO 01/99153 on Dec. 27, 2001. The above materials are hereby incorporated by reference.
As is well known, soft errors in memory devices are caused by, among other things, cosmic rays (neutrons), and alpha particles present in semiconductor materials and packaging. In typical SRAMs, the failure rate attributable to soft-errors (the so-called soft-error rate —SER) is measured by a metric known as Failures In Time (FIT); the basic unit of this benchmark refers to a malfunction occurrence frequency, where 1 FIT represents one malfunction every one billion hours (approximately 100,000 years) per device. For a conventional SRAM operating under normal conditions an FIT value of up to several thousand is considered adequate, and a value of less than approximately 1000 FIT/Mbit is preferable for embedded memory applications. In some applications more stringent requirements may be needed (i.e, on the order of 10-100 FIT/Mbit).
Soft errors can also influence SRAM embodiments which use NDR devices. Thus there is clearly a need for NDR FET and an NDR FET based SRAM device that have superior soft error characteristics.